None.
The present invention relates to the field of motion analysis. More particularly, the invention pertains to clinical research and health care for persons with disabilities, athletes and athletic coaches, and the sports and entertainment industries.
Motion study has been of interest for a great many years, particularly that relating to the human body. Sequential pictures of body movement was a subject of early photography. In the early 1970xe2x80x2s a system for quantizing human locomotion, was developed, and methods of joint motion measurement since then. Several types of measuring techniques are now being used: electromechanical linkage; stereometric; accelerometeric; magnetic coupling; biplanar roentgenographic; and radio frequency (RF). Most of these methods are expensive to install and maintain, may be sensitive to interference by body parts, take time to get results and present difficulties in reducing and interpreting the data. The Roentgenographic method, though accurate, presents the hazard of ionizing radiation which is harmful to living subjects.
RF methods have been seriously investigated as an alternative since about 1994. These methods are relatively inexpensive, offer real-time motion capture capability, have high sampling rates, very good resolution and accuracy. The Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory (Laboratory) and San Diego Children""s Hospital and Health Center (CHHC) together developed RF concepts in 1994. At the same time, Softimage of Montreal, Canada was interested in respect of video games.
Over twelve million people in the United States have lower extremity disabilities, according to the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (1994). Five-hundred thousand Americans have cerebral palsy, growing at the rate of 4,500 cases per year. Clinical gait analysis is a diagnostic tool for prescribing treatment for patients who suffer with neuromuscular, musculoskeletal, or neurological impairments. The primary goal in treating a person who has these problems is to correct their functional deficiencies and thereby improve their quality of life. Functional deficiencies are quantified analytically by having the subject perform simple tasks while patterns of limb movements are systematically measured. Motion-capture data reduces the number of surgeries required to correct some problems.
Trakus, Inc. of Medford, Mass., in their Internet site http://www.Trakus.com, describe an RF system which converts object motion into digital data that can be analyzed or used for entertainment purposes. Their product, designed for hockey and football, provides information about an athlete""s movements on the playing field. Each athlete wears a transmitter which weighs two ounces. The transmitters send signals to antennas that surround the playing field. The system operates in spread spectrum because of the presence of other RF signals at base frequency of 2.45 GHz. The system uses time of arrival (TOA) measurements to calculate a player""s position on the field. Sample rate of these measurements is about 30 times per second for each player on the field.
Providing a method and apparatus for real-time measurement of human body motion has been a continuing problem for clinical researchers, athletic coaches and live-sports commentators, to name a few. There is a great emphasis on knowing the outcome of medical treatment and extraordinary interest in using such motion information to enhance competitive athletics and to complement sports, industry, the military and entertainment. The inability of currently-used technology, to provide inexpensive, real-time analysis of the motion of limbs and joints has been frustrating. This is particularly true of widely used optical systems. Relatively new radio frequency approaches have not yet been applied to the detailed measurements required for the applications mentioned above. Producing analytical measurement of human motion, at a high sampling rate and with high resolution will revolutionize the field of human performance analysis, among other things, by expanding the range of application and reducing the cost of necessary healthcare for disabled persons. Solving these problems would constitute a major technological advance and would satisfy a long felt need in medicine, athletics, and recreation and entertainment industries.
An objective of the present invention is to develop a precision position measurement system that uses radio frequency (RF) phase interferometry. Energy sources, which are transmitting antennas disposed on a subject, are continuously located by receiving apparatus to a resolution of one millimeter (mm). This data is used, for example, in clinical gait analysis applications. Advantages include significant time savings for data analysis, real-time motion acquisition and display, high frame-rate acquisition, full body motion acquisition and reduced data loss from occlusion of markers on the subject. Enhancement of human body motion performance is an end result. Two methods of measuring position are contemplated.
The first measurement method uses a single antenna at each of several widely separated receiving locations to xe2x80x9ctriangulatexe2x80x9d each energy source. By examining the differences in signal phase at pairs of receiving locations, source position is determined by one of two approaches. A first approach uses a known starting position for a source and computes changes in position. A second approach computes position by examining the enclosed volume for physical positions where the measured phase relationship would occur.
The second measurement method uses a small array of antennas at each of several receiving locations. Each array is able to determine the direction of arrival of the transmitted signal and the transmitter location is determined from the intersection of the direction-of-arrival vectors.
While the discussion which follows focuses on human body motion as an example, the measurement techniques of this invention can also be applied to animals, robotics, mechanical metrology and other articulated bodies and machines.
The Body Motion Tracking System measures path lengths to a number of receiving antennas from a source or xe2x80x9cmarkerxe2x80x9d antenna, disposed on a subject at a physical location to be tracked, to provide an estimate of the source""s position time history.
Four to six receiving antennas are positioned at the edges of a volume in which activity is being conducted. Each antenna is coupled to a preamplifier which drives a mixer. In a preferred embodiment, the received signal is down-converted to translate the RF energy from microwave frequency to an intermediate frequency (IF) of about three Megahertz (MHz). A single reference oscillator must be fed to all of the mixers in order to preserve the phase relationships of the RF signals from the receiving antennas. The IF signals are presented to a bank of analog-to-digital converters which transform the analog signals to a digital signal format. A common sampling clock, operating in one embodiment at sixteen MHz, is used in this conversion process. Choice of clock frequency depends on the hardware selected and whether direct or sub-sampling is desired. The use of a common clock is required to preserve the phase relationships of the RF signals received.
Digital representations of the received signals are presented to the inputs of a multi-channel digital tuner. The digital signals are translated again to about one KHz. Narrow-band filtering and sampling rate reduction are applied. Phase relationships are still preserved because all of the signal processing up to this step is xe2x80x9ccoherent.xe2x80x9d
The digital data is fed to a main computer and processed to estimate each marker antenna""s position. There are significant differences between this technique and conventional direction finding techniques.
Conventional DF systems consist of a number of small arrays of receiving antennas. They operate with the assumption that the range from a source to a receiving antenna is very large relative to the spacing of the antennas in the receiving array. As a result, the RF energy wavefront can be represented as a xe2x80x9cplane wavexe2x80x9d at the receiving array. In conventional DF systems, each receiving location measures the xe2x80x9cangle of arrivalxe2x80x9d of the RF energy with respect to a system reference direction by phase measurement at adjacent pairs of antennas. The position of the source is estimated by xe2x80x9ctriangulation,xe2x80x9d that is, finding the intersection of lines drawn from each of three or more receiving locations, along the angle of arrival measured at that location.
The present invention employs differential phase measurement between pairs of widely spaced antennas to determine source position. The range (distance) from a transmitter (source) to a receiver uniquely determines the phase difference between the transmitted and the received signals. The difference in the ranges from a transmitter to two receivers uniquely determines the phase difference in the two received signals. The locus of points with the same range difference is one-half of a hyperbola of revolution with the two receivers as foci. Thus, barring abnormal placement of the receive antennas, the range difference for three pairs of antennas (four antennas total) determines a unique transmitter position within a workspace.
In one preferred embodiment of the present invention, the source transmits a continuous wave (CW) signal, i.e., a sine-wave. All range differences that differ by an integer number of wavelengths for a pair of receiving antennas, produce the same value of phase difference. Therefore, the locus of points having the same phase difference at a pair of receiving antennas is a family of hyperbolas of revolution having the two antennas as foci. Adjacent hyperbolas are one-half wavelength apart where they intersect the line joining the two antennas. Phase difference measurements using several pairs of receiving antennas may produce many equally valid solutions for transmitter position. However, if the volume of space containing the correct solution is suitably constrained, the phase difference measurements will produce only one valid solution.
Changes in the transmitter position will alter the lengths of the signal paths and therefore the phases of the received signals. However, if an estimate of the position of a transmitter is available and the next set of phase difference measurements is made when the transmitter could not have moved more than a small fraction of wavelength, then the volume in which the new transmitter position must be found is small enough to contain only one solution to the phase-difference equations and the new position can be determined uniquely. Because of the physics of RF propagation in a linear, isotropic medium, changes in phase difference measurements from time-to-time are due to transmitter movement.
The present invention contemplates several methods of establishing an initial position of the transmitter antenna. Each method may be appropriate for different applications of the invention. The simplest method requires the transmitter antenna to start from a particular position. A second method, using a small array of antennas at each receiving antenna location, allows calculation of a line-of-sight from each receiving antenna position to the transmitting antenna. As in conventional DF systems, the intersection of these lines-of-sight provide a position estimate sufficient to initialize phase difference tracking. A third method employs a large number of receiving antennas. When the number of such antennas is sufficiently large, a unique transmitter position can be determined, although the amount of computation increases dramatically with the number of receiving antennas.
The third method of establishing an initial position of the transmitting antenna requires finding its position in a large workspace with no information other than phase difference of received signals. The solution is found as follows: For each pair of receive antennas, the path length difference is an integer number of signal wavelengths plus a fractional part of a wavelength. The phase difference in the two received signals is a measure of the fractional wavelength part of the path length difference. The workspace geometry determines the range of possible integer values of path length difference. Each integer value defines a different hyperbola of revolution. By evaluating all possible combinations of integer values, one combination for each receiver pair, the point where all the hyperbolas intersect is found. This point then represents the initial position of the transmitting antenna.
Each signal enables identification and tracking of single energy source. In one preferred embodiment, a single unmodulated frequency is transmitted. The signal is switched between each of the marker antennas located on a subject of motion study in a known sequence. The signal is emitted from the marker antennas and the propagated signal is received by a plurality of receiving antennas. The receiving apparatus uses the known switching sequence to identify the transmitter associated with each emitted signal and the uses the procedures described above to estimate the position of each marker antenna.
In another embodiment, each marker antenna transmits the same carrier frequency modulated with a different orthogonal signature waveform or code sequence. The receiving apparatus uses the orthogonality of these signature codes to separate the signals from each marker antenna. The receiving apparatus then uses the procedures described above to estimate the position of each marker antenna. Because the orthogonality of the code sequences allows the receiving apparatus to separate the signals from the marker antennas, all marker antennas can transmit all the time. Continuous tracking of each one of the marker antennas is thereby enabled. This technique supports use of spread spectrum transmissions. The two preceding embodiments can be used in combination, each signature code being time-multiplexed between several marker antennas.
An appreciation of other aims and objectives of the present invention may be achieved by studying the following description of preferred and alternate embodiments and by referring to the accompanying drawings.